Is Your JOB Sabotaging Your HEALTH?

You’ve been trying SO HARD to get fit, whether it be lose fat, gain muscle, increase endurance, etc. but for some reason you just can’t seem to pull your life together enough to stay on track. This can be the most frustrating thing, right?

A big reason people have a hard time sticking to a fitness routine, nutritious diet, or healthy lifestyle in general, can often be because of work.

Think about it — essentially, work is your lifeline. Without a job or some source of steady income your lifeline gets cut and for most of us, that means no way to provide ourselves with food, clothing, shelter, and ultimately a way to survive. So what do we do?

We put work first. Now this isn’t the WORST thing but I do think it would serve us well to change the way we think about work and our health.

Work/life balance should be a priority for EVERYONE. Why? Because what good are any of us while performing our jobs if our health declines because we let it take a backseat to our jobs/careers.

The Downward Spiral:

1) You stay late at work — so late that you miss your workout entirely, or are simply too tired to muster up the strength to go. Then, you get home late and don’t the time and energy to cook a healthy meal, so you order out, or reach for something processed and most-likely unhealthy.

2) Not to mention, from overworking yourself, you most likely become over-tired and sleep deprived. Not allowing your body enough time to recover/sleep.

3) Now that your over-tired, you overeat. Your body is craving sweets, simple carbs, and anything else sugary/starchy in an attempt to get quick energy for your body and compensate for your lack of sleep with calories that you don’t necessarily need.

4) Those sugary, starchy foods throw your blood sugar out of whack, giving you peaks and valleys of energy, which only leave you feeling more depleted than when you started.

5) As a result, you end up bloated and tired and given enough time, will even gain some weight. The more weight you gain, the harder you have to work to get fit.

6) No Work-Life Balance = STRESS — A lack of work/life balance can create stress and we all know stress can make us overeat and/or suffer from a disrupted sleep pattern and with that comes a weakened immune system, inviting illness into our lives.

Can you see the downward spiral overworking yourself can create? If you take your work seriously, you should take your health just as seriously because a healthy you can add a lot more value to your job than a tired, unhealthy, and unhappy you.

If your job is making you unhappy, do everything in your power to find another. If leaving your job isn’t option, take steps to make sure you take care of yourself, with just as much determination that you bring to the workplace.